


Circles

by Unforgotten



Category: Captain America (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, M/M, Recovery, Reunions, Road Trips, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 10:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16406285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: Bucky's perfectly good post-TWS getaway plan is complicated when a stranger from another world shows up, claiming to know him.





	Circles

The Soldier was still dripping from the river when the guy found him. Not the confusing guy; not the target. Someone else. Someone he'd never expected.

He'd had training about what to do in situations like this. When he'd blown his cover. When there was a manhunt. There were steps. First, to find something to cover his arm, his hand, his face; second, to dispose of any weapon too large to hide; third, to find transportation (best) or go to ground (if he had to) until he found his handlers or they came for him.

They would come for him this time, as they'd always come for him before; but he'd already decided they wouldn't find him this time.

Still, the strategy they'd given him, the one he'd followed for other missions gone wrong...it was sound enough. So he'd managed to find a jacket, a ball cap, and a left-handed glove. Then he'd looked for a car, and the chaos in the area had made that much easier in broad daylight than it should have been. No one had looked at him. No one had seemed to file him away in their heads as something suspicious, something dangerous. He was sure of this. He'd been watching; he'd have noticed.

By the time the guy showed up, the plan was already going sideways, despite his precautions. It was because of his hand. The left was fine: steady and sure, just like always. It was the other one that was the problem. The right one, the hand of flesh; the one that had caused trouble before because it was the one that stopped being able to do anything when something inside it snapped.

That hand wasn't broken this time, or even bruised. But it was the stupidest thing: the harder he concentrated on trying to pop the lock, the more his right hand shook, the more it sweated, more the coat hanger slipped.

He couldn't tear the door off the car; looking normal was the most important part when it came to extractions. He couldn't smash in the window, for the same reason. He had to get this right.

He might have stayed there until his handlers found him, after all, if someone hadn't said, "Will you help me, good sir?" And then, when the Soldier turned: "...Bucky?"

The other person who'd called him by that name ( _Steve?_ he wondered, fleetingly) had been desperate, grasping; like he wanted or needed something the Soldier couldn't have given even if he'd known what it was. This one, though; when this guy said the name, he smiled. It shone in his face, made it almost too bright to look at.

"Yeah," the Soldier said. "Bucky. That's me."

It was probably a stupid move to decide to be Bucky for this guy. To even stand here talking to this guy. For one thing, with an outfit like that—he looked like he belongs in a renaissance fair; Bucky'd been to one once, during a mission, and he was pretty sure no one dressed like that outside of one—they'd both stand out, when nothing about Bucky needed to stand out. For another thing, he'd always been trained to minimize contact. He wasn't supposed to talk to his team or his targets more than necessary, nevermind random people from off the street.

"It's been a year since you left," said the guy. "I had despaired of ever seeing you again—much less here, in what must be your own world. I thought I might be there, from the first moment I arrived...but I was not certain until I saw your face."

To Bucky's slight horror, the guy was now crying. While smiling, and shining. Bucky hadn't known those things could go together.

"What are you about?" the guy asked, after wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

"I locked myself out of my car," Bucky said, jiggling the wire hanger a little more. That had always been the script before; hopefully it would work this time, too. After all, it was a lot harder to hide bodies in the back of a hatchback.

"I see," said the guy, in a tone that indicated he didn't actually get it at all. "Is there anything I may do to assist you?"

And that was how Bucky ended up getting the king of some country he'd never heard of from a world he'd never even known existed to help him steal a car. The guy moved the hanger the way Bucky showed him, and although he was a little awkward, his grip never wavered. Not like Bucky's right hand had.

Thankfully, Bucky didn't have to try to explain how to hotwire a car; there was a key under the sun visor, and a couple credit cards in a wallet in the glove box. (He would never have gotten that lucky in a training scenario, but real people were stupid.)

"What now?" asked the guy.

"Get in so we can go," Bucky said, mostly because if he was going to be Bucky, there might as well be someone with him who appreciated the effort.

Besides, he was going to have to switch cars at some point. If his hand wasn't steady by then, this guy could come in useful.

***

"What is this vessel?" the guy asked a minute later. "It moves so quickly. Is it what you call a train?"

"It's a Ford," Bucky said. "I think."

"It is astonishingly swift. You told me so, of course...but I never dreamed of seeing the world flash by at such a speed. I can barely make sense of any single thing."

"I'm not going to slow down."

"I would not wish you to. If anything, I would wish for our journey to be even more swift—though I do not suppose that much is possible, even in your world."

They were going 45 in a 35. Up ahead was the entrance ramp to the highway.

"Watch this," Bucky said, and put his foot on the gas.

***

A few minutes later, the guy said, "You are so quiet. Even more so than is usual. Are you displeased to have me here?"

"No," Bucky said. "I don't know you. Or if I did, I don't remember."

People were usually angry or cold when Bucky didn't know something he was supposed to (or if he knew something he wasn't supposed to; he'd learned a long time ago not to over-answer questions). But when he glanced over, the guy in the passenger seat was looking at him with something else—something that wasn't all that different from the way his last target had looked at him. Later, when he had a better handle on things, Bucky would decide the something else had been grief. For now, he just wished he'd noticed it before, so he would have known better than to invite this guy along.

"So your captors have found you once again," the guy said. "I had not thought to fear it might be so. In fact, I thought of nothing but my own joy at seeing you again...oh. You say you do not know me, and so introductions must be made. I am Rilian, king of Narnia. You came to me in my hour of need the year before last, and were my dear companion for several seasons. If you will hear it, I will tell you of our first meeting, and of the time we spent together. Perhaps then you will begin to recall it for yourself."

Bucky wasn't sure he wanted to hear any of it, whatever it was. One friend he only sort of remembered was enough.

"Go ahead," he said anyway.

"The year before you came, I had been freed from a Witch's long curse. (This in itself is a long tale, and a difficult one; I will tell you of it again later, if there comes a need.) The first few months of my freedom were joyful indeed. Yet as the seasons passed, I despaired more and more; for I felt a stain upon me during the day, and suffered from terrors in the night. I bore it for many months, as was my duty to my people—but as the year mark approached, the days seemed to me to be darker and darker. It seemed to me then that best thing I could do for Narnia would be to forsake it again—but on my own terms, this time. For this reason, I returned to the northern lands, not far from where the Witch first entrapped me. I came to a beautiful lake I had never seen before (or perhaps never thought to gaze upon; my previous visits to that land had not allowed for contemplations of that sort). I sat by the water's edge for many long minutes, and the more I thought on my intention, the more certain I became that it was the necessary thing, and the only road left to me.

"Then, before I could act, there came a great splash from the lake. I raised my eyes to see some fool swimming toward me. That was you. You emerged from the water (and I still do not know how you managed to speak, for this was after the first snow of the season, and your teeth ought to been chattering), and you smiled at me—oh, so wildly—and told me we would be the greatest of friends, you and I."

"That doesn't sound like me," Bucky said. Not any recent version of him, anyway. Not any version of him he remembered (though he knew enough to know there had been other hims, and that one of them could have been different enough).

"Nevertheless, it is true. Astonished, I brought you back to Cair Paravel—that is, to the castle by the sea, where I sit in rule—and from then I found my burden easier to bear. For you offered to me your calming presence, night and day; and you imparted to me your own experiences, which were very like mine own. I am more sorry than I can tell that you have been forced to endure them once again."

"It's okay," Bucky said, his voice sounding distant to his own ears.

"If only I had my sword, I would challenge all who have harmed you to mortal combat," Rilian said.

"Maybe later," Bucky said. He didn't think swords would go over all that well with Hydra. "Right now we're lying low."

***

They drove another couple hours, then stopped at a Walmart for three paper bags full of things in cans and boxes that wouldn't have to be warmed up. They stopped at another one for toiletries and a screwdriver, and a third for a change of clothes for both of them. Rilian slowed him down so much at the first two stops—marveling at the size of the buildings and asking about every single thing on the shelves he didn't recognize, which was just about everything—that Bucky made him stay in the car from the third Walmart on.

Bucky made each purchase with a different credit card, then threw all three of them away at the gas station they filled up at. After dark, they stopped off at a fourth Walmart, where Bucky had spied a car at the back of the parking lot that was the same model and color as the one they were in.

One license plate swap later, Bucky got back in the driver's seat.

"I am beginning to question the manner in which we acquired this vessel," said Rilian.

"You're supposed to switch the plates every five hundred miles," Bucky said, and wouldn't recognize what he was feeling as low-level glee until several weeks later, after he'd told Rilian a few more whoppers just for the hell of it, and gotten a little more used to being a person. "There's a law about it."

"I see."

"We'll have to switch cars tomorrow," Bucky said. "Just so you aren't surprised later."

"Is that a law as well?"

"More like common sense."

They drove for a few more hours, then found a seedy little motel—the kind that took cash, the kind that people lived in. Bucky made sure the front desk got a look at Rilian—between the guy wearing a nondescript jacket and cap, and the guy who looked like he should have been walking around a couple hundred years ago, one guess about which would stick in people's minds—and then dragged him to their room before Rilian could ask too many questions.

"This is where you reside?" Rilian asked when they were inside. He sounded distressed; apparently kings from other worlds weren't much for cockroaches, about a hundred of which had gone skittering under the furniture when Bucky flicked on the light.

"For tonight, yeah," Bucky said.

"There is only one bed."

"This was the only room they had," Bucky said, which wasn't so much the truth as it was part of the strategy: if anyone was following him, they wouldn't expect him to be with anyone else, but they'd expect him to be part of an apparent couple even less. "But we won't be sharing."

"One of us sleeps, while the other keeps a watch?"

Bucky hadn't expected Rilian to get that one right away.

"Yeah," he said.

***

Rilian was fascinated by the shower—running water apparently wasn't a thing where he was from—but puzzled by the TV remote. He peered at it from all angles, then started to poke at the buttons. One of them must have been the on button, because the TV blared to life, and he startled. He didn't drop the remote, which Bucky halfway expected, but gripped it harder instead.

"What is that?" Rilian asked, sounding as alarmed as he was potentially delighted. (Bucky had already figured out that 'potentially delighted' was his default for almost everything.)

"It's a TV," Bucky said. "You just turned it on."

"Ah." Bucky was getting the feeling that was what Rilian said when he had no idea what was going on. "What is its purpose?"

Bucky gestured for the remote, and Rilian passed it over. Bucky lowered the volume, and flipped through the channels. It was familiar and easy enough; turning the TV on for a noise buffer was a standard tactic for the kind of thing he'd been doing before today. "You know, I'm not really sure."

You could watch the news on it, but Bucky had been with Hydra long enough to know how little truth you'd get that way. You could watch movies or shows, but it was hard to see the appeal of doing that in this drab little room, when the last time Bucky had watched a movie, it had been at...he couldn't remember. Someplace better than this. Someplace better than any of the memories he had of TVs blaring behind him while he had a gun or a knife in his hand.

He flipped around to fifteen channels or so, until Rilian announced that the screen was starting to hurt his eyes. It was doing the same thing for Bucky, so he didn't have a problem with turning it off.

***

When Bucky woke up the next morning, after taking the second watch, Rilian was talking to someone outside. Bucky reached for the gun under his pillow and the knife at his hip, and went to see what was happening.

On the sidewalk outside the motel room door, Rilian was sitting cross-legged, talking to a pigeon.

"The hell are you doing?" Bucky asked.

"I thought perhaps this was a talking bird," Rilian said. "Though he has remained silent long enough that I now believe myself mistaken."

"It's just a pigeon. You want to see a talking bird, I'll take you to a petstore," Bucky said. "Aren't you supposed to be keeping watch?."

"Our quarters have only the one door. It can be watched just as well from either side. What is this Pet Store?"

Bucky thought about the stories Rilian had told him the day before: Animals that talked, that thought, that were basically people. Maybe a guy who came from a place like that wouldn't be too keen on animals in cages. Bucky wasn't sure he would be, either. "Nevermind. We've got to get going."

He'd paid for three nights, but the need to get away was itching inside his skin; and besides, if anyone was following them after all, and talked to the clerk, it would be a good strategy.

***

It was a bad strategy. Credit card #4 was declined at the pump, and Bucky had less than a hundred dollars left in cash.

Time to switch cars. But not here, and not now—there were only a few other cars there, and it was too early in the morning. They'd have to find a busier station. Something in a big city around rush hour. They had enough gas money to get them through until then, so Bucky filled the tank after all, paying with cash.

He drove in a mostly-random direction, reading city names on signs, figuring the ones that pinged something way back in his memory were probably the big ones. He'd never done much driving before, hadn't spent much time on the highway; when he had driven to a target alone, he'd always been dropped off no more than a few miles out. A lot of the time, he hadn't even known which country he was in, much less which city or town.

As Bucky drove, Rilian chatted at him about this and that. Things they'd done in Narnia, wherever the hell that was; and he had lots of questions, about everything they passed. Billboards, the blue flashing lights when they passed a cop car on the shoulder, every vehicle that passed them that didn't look exactly like their car.

Bucky only knew the answers part of the time, but Rilian didn't seem to mind. Bucky didn't either, for whatever reason.

Maybe it was the fact that he didn't mind that made him come to the decision; or maybe it was just common sense. It was one thing to travel with another person for a while, but the more Bucky thought about it, the more he thought Rilian might get him the wrong kind of attention. Even in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, he was the kind of person who stood out.

He didn't shout when they were around other people, or even really project his voice...but when they stopped at McDonald's for dinner, Bucky caught more than one person staring at them. Rilian wasn't loud—wasn't so much as raising his voice, never mind shouting—but there was something about him that kept drawing people's attention.

Whatever it was, though, by the time five o'clock came around, Bucky had already decided he needed to go on alone.

They'd stopped at Love's at around four-thirty. By a quarter after five, it was as busy as you could hope for. Bucky looked out the window while Rilian went to the restroom (he was fascinated by the toilet, so he'd probably be in there for at least fifteen minutes).

Bucky was waiting for one specific thing, and it didn't take long: five minutes after Rilian had left the table, a minivan parked on the other side of the pumps. A man and a woman got out with two little kids and a baby carrier. Before they crossed the parking lot, the woman put something in the trunk, making sure she'd jammed it under enough things that no one could see it just by looking through the car window. It was obviously her purse (people were _so_ stupid).

As soon as the family was inside and headed toward the restroom—neither the man nor the woman so much as glanced back at the van, which meant they probably wouldn't go out of their way to look out the window from inside, either—Bucky headed for the van. No one watched him; the parking lot was a nightmare, way too busy for anyone to worry about what he was doing if it didn't involve them, or to realize he didn't match the people who had gotten out of the van to begin with.

Both hands steady this time, it took Bucky just a few seconds to pop open the back of the van, a few more to grab the purse, take the large bills and two of the credit cards nested behind the debit card. Then he put the purse back, closed the trunk, and sidled over to a sedan that had pulled in two spaces down as he had walked across the parking lot.

He had just opened the driver's side door when a shadow came from under the car and rubbed against his ankle.

He looked down to see a cat, a large yellow one. It had to weigh at least twenty pounds. It circled his legs, not seeming to care that they didn't know each other. If he hadn't known better, he'd have thought it gave him a knowing look when it rubbed against the bulge on the inside of his left ankle (gun #3).

"Go away," Bucky said.

In response, the cat jumped into the driver's seat, and sat down. It looked smug.

"I _will_ shoot you," Bucky said, but before he could get around to deciding whether it was worth the mess, Rilian appeared beside him.

"I wondered where you had gone," he said. "Is this to be our new Ford?"

"It's a Toyota," Bucky said.

The cat jumped out of the car and ran to Rilian, rubbing itself around his ankles just as it had with Bucky—except that this time, it was purring.

"What is this?" Rilian asked, bending down. "We are well met, sir Cat."

Bucky sighed. "We're not keeping it."

Rilian and the cat admired each other for a minute. Then the cat turned abruptly, and walked beneath the car. Rilian bent over to look, and stood up with a strange expression on his face. "He's vanished," he said. "I wonder..."

What Rilian wondered, Bucky didn't ask. What Bucky wondered, as Rilian got in the passenger seat, was why he wasn't more annoyed that he hadn't managed to ditch him after all.

***

They made good time. By the time they stopped for the second night, they were somewhere in Kansas, more than a thousand miles from where they'd started. Remembering Rilian's dismay the previous night, Bucky found a better motel, using one of the credit cards to pay for it.

Rilian took first watch this time. When Bucky woke up, he was already out of bed, with a gun in his hand. Rilian was standing a few feet away, empty hands outstretched; the gun's barrel was aimed at his forehead.

"What's going on?" Bucky demanded. He kept the gun trained on Rilian, and tried to remember.

"You were crying out in your sleep, and so I woke you."

Whatever he'd been dreaming, Bucky couldn't remember it. "What the hell is wrong with you? I could have killed you."

"I knew the risk," said Rilian. "But I simply could not bear to hear you, or to leave you alone in it."

Bucky lowered the gun, and only then realized how hard he was breathing, how much he was sweating. His chest hurt, and his clothes were sticking to him. His throat was sore when he swallowed, and his voice was gravelly when he said, "We have to go."

"The night's only half gone."

"We have to go," Bucky said again, because after something like that—after an outburst like that, there was no way they wouldn't wipe him. Didn't matter what he said. Didn't matter what else, if anything, he'd done. The Soldier had to be calm, unaffected. The Soldier had to be in control of himself, even when he was sleeping.

They'd been on the road for three hours by the time Bucky came back to himself enough to remember exactly where he was, and who he was with, and that he hadn't even seen anyone tailing them. No handlers, no last target; the only person who knew where he was was the king from another country who was sitting very quietly in the passenger seat, watching Bucky with something that would have looked like concern seventy years ago, back when he was still a person.

Bucky dwelled on it until the sun came up, which was about when he got sick of himself, of being in his own head. "Do you wanna go to the gun range?"

As he'd had to explain everything else under the sun, he now had to explain about gun ranges. Rilian picked up on this one quickly: "Like practicing with bow and arrow."

"More or less. It's got a little more of a kick, though."

***

Rilian seemed solemn again after they'd spent a couple hours blowing holes in big, human-shaped pieces of paper. He wasn't half bad at it; if they did end up in a firefight, he'd almost definitely manage to shoot Hydra instead of Bucky. Bucky found himself cheered by this idea; before, he'd planned on abandoning Rilian if that happened, but this felt better. Maybe it was just that two were better than one on most missions, even if it had never seemed like that before.

Then Rilian said, "You might have shot me with your gun, last night."

It hadn't occurred to Bucky until now that the reason Rilian hadn't been concerned before was that he didn't really know about guns. "Yeah."

"I suppose it would have been louder than an arrow."

Okay, maybe he didn't get guns yet. Bucky thought about explaining about it. How messy gunshot wounds were, what different kinds of bullets could do to a person. What the hollow points in that particular gun could have done to Rilian.

He thought about explaining it, but in the end he just spent the rest of the day mulling it over in his own head.

***

Later, after they'd stopped at a Burger King for dinner, and found another hotel room—this one somewhere between the nasty one and the nice one—Rilian asked, "What is our intended destination?"

"Hadn't thought about it," Bucky said, because that had to be better than admitting that the only place he'd wanted to go was away from anyone who wanted him.

"Truly?"

Bucky didn't say anything.

"We could discuss it together," Rilian said. "As we did before, when it was I who floundered."

Bucky could have argued that he wasn't floundering, but in all honestly he wasn't sure if he was or not. "Somewhere safe," he said, after he'd thought about it; after Rilian had waited for him to think about it. "Somewhere I can figure out the rest."

"Will our current path lead us there? Or will continuing in our thievery cause us even more trouble in the end?" asked Rilian.

"I don't know what else to do. I don't know where else to go." Bucky didn't realize he was going to admit it until he did, didn't know he was capable of showing that much weakness to anyone on purpose until it happened.

He didn't realize he was waiting for Rilian to come up with a solution until they were on the road again and Rilian hadn't.

"We've gone so far already," mused Rilian. "Your world must be so vast, if we have yet to come to its end."

It took Bucky a minute to realize what Rilian meant by that. "You're pulling my leg, right?"

"I do not jest. In my world, it is the sea that is the greater voyage—the Eastern Sea, which nearly no man has ever sailed all the way to its end. My father was among them, along with three friends from your world—and o, what tales he told of their journey!"

Rilian went on to tell a really long story about that, which involved people being turned into dragons, his dad being sold as a slave, and Rilian's mom being a star's daughter. Bucky would have thought it was one hell of a tall tale, except for the way Rilian looked as he told it, every time Bucky glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. Rilian believed every word of it. Rilian thought it was all wonderful.

When he finished, Bucky said, "The ocean's pretty big here, too. Also, the world is round."

"My father always claimed as much," Rilian exclaimed, looking even more delighted. "As a boy I believed him, but later…it did not seem as if such a fanciful thing could be true, even of your world. Now it seems I've been wrong to disbelieve, for all these years."

Bucky wasn't completely sure, but he thought Rilian looked more troubled than most people would, talking about parents they remembered, who'd told them stories when they were kids. He thought that until he remembered Rilian was supposed to be a king, and that if his dad had been the king before him, there was only one way for Rilian to have become one. Bucky had killed a few people so that someone else could step into their shoes, so he knew.

When he said this to Rilian, though, Rilian looked startled and said, "I—no. I did not slay my father. He died on the very day I was freed from my enchantment. I returned to Cair Paravel less than an hour before. There is no doubt that my absence hastened his death, or that the voyage he sailed on to learn who Aslan meant to be his heir taxed him sorely. I suppose his death must be on my hands after all, in the end."

"I didn't mean to—" Bucky wasn't sure what he hadn't meant. He hadn't meant for Rilian to look or sound the way he did when he said all that. Hadn't meant to send him back to wherever he'd gone. Couldn't be a good place; some of the light had gone out of his face, and maybe it would never come back. Bucky didn't know. He wasn't really sure which kinds of things came back and which didn't. "I'm sorry."

"It is of no consequence," Rilian said, though it was pretty clearly of a pretty damned lot of consequence.

Bucky drove. It was a lot quieter in the car than it had been before. He tried to think of something new he could explain to Rilian, but it was hard to think like a person from another world. Who knew what kinds of things needed explaining, anyway? He'd thought highways were self-explanatory, but he'd spend the last three days explaining everything about them anyway.

He didn't want to waste too much time thinking about it—over-thinking in the field was a great way to make mistakes—and so what he ended up saying was, "I don't remember my parents." Or if he'd even known his parents. Or if he'd had any other family. All he remembered, even a little, was his last target ( _Steve?_ ), and that was probably just because he'd been the one to jar things loose.

"I know," Rilian said. The brooding didn't so much leave him as it retreated, to be replaced by compassion. "It troubled you before, as well. I am grieved to learn that it persists."

"Me too," Bucky said, not that it made any sense.

He found he was grieved, as well, that he couldn't remember a single thing about Rilian, or that other world he'd been to, the one where they'd met.

***

A couple weeks and a bunch of states later, the library.

Bucky hadn't been trained how to learn new things on his own. If you could do that, maybe it would let you figure out things no one wanted you to know. How to run when they didn't want you to. How to hide. How to start trying to remember, so that when you passed library, it would jarred something inside you, and you would knew that was where you should go when you needed to figure things out.

He hadn't known the library would have computers, but it did. You could use them for thirty minutes at a time. Longer, if there wasn't a line. It was the middle of the day on a Tuesday, so no one was. Bucky knew how to use a computer. He'd retrieved a lot of intell over the years, on a lot of different storage devices. Some of his memories were a little spotty, but even if he couldn't remember if floppy disks had come before or after thumb drives, he could still figure out how to use Google.

Didn't take too long for him to find what he needed. They needed someplace long-term to stay. Someplace they could pay for in cash, without having to have ID. That was one of the things they'd always drilled into him: everything outside needed ID. The Soldier didn't have anything like that, because he wasn't a person; Bucky didn't have anything like that, either. If he ever tried to go where they hadn't said he could go, he'd be found out immediately.

But maybe not if they sublet an apartment. The Google results were full of rules about subletting that a lot of people probably wouldn't follow. People were stupid about what they left in their cars; there were sure to be people who were stupid about this, too.

Rilian had stood by Bucky, reading over his shoulder with a certain wide-eyed wonder that was almost as good as it had been the first day, when he'd wanted to go faster. When Bucky explained what he'd found, and then started to stand up, Rilian said, "Wait a moment. If you could use this machine to learn anything, as you say...could you not learn of yourself, as well?"

Bucky hadn't thought of that. He'd been too focused on the new mission to think of that. Now that Rilian had thought of it for him, he realized there was no way he was leaving without doing exactly what Rilian had just said.

Forty-five minutes later, the computers were a little more crowded, and the librarians had started to give them the side-eye. Time to go.

***

Bucky hadn't known he'd had sisters. Hadn't known a lot of other things, but that was the one that stayed on his mind at first. Three of them, all younger than him. He'd have protected them, maybe, the way he'd always protected Steve (he remembered Steve better now, memories that got clearer every day, even if most of them were still missing). Maybe they'd been nicer about it than Steve ever had. He had no way to know.

Most of the rest of the stuff he'd found filled in the gaps around the things he did remember. Taking down Hydra facilities in Europe; covering Steve with his rifle, time and time again. Never any thought in his head of putting a bullet in the back of Steve's head. Never a thought of anything but the targets, the calculation of how close they were to Steve, and how far, and whether there was a breeze. The margin of error, and whether he should take the shot.

***

It didn't take long to find an apartment. Girl moving in with her boyfriend; said she couldn't afford to break the lease, but really she wanted an out if she needed one during the six months left on it. She didn't say so, not out loud and not with her boyfriend there, but Bucky saw it anyway, and approved. It was always good to have an exit strategy in place.

Bucky wondered about the neighbors, the first week or two. They weren't technically supposed to be there; someone might start something. But no one did, and if he didn't exactly let his guard down, he did stop expecting something to happen every time he went out into the hall.

Nothing happened, and nothing happened, and eventually, it occurred to Bucky that they might have managed to cover up their trail well enough not only to have gotten away in the moment, but to have gotten away for good. He'd seen no sign of a tail during the weeks they'd spent driving around. If they'd had one, he would have seen it; he was always looking, maybe would always be looking. He'd have seen it if it were Steve, trying to be inconspicuous for the first time in his life and failing just as dramatically as you'd expect; he'd have seen it even more quickly if it were Hydra, because those movements were the ones he knew, the ones he'd been on the other end of, so many times.

As soon as it occurred to him that they might be free and clear, that was when he knew they had to go.

"But why?" said Rilian, when Bucky told him what he'd decided. "You said it yourself: we are in no peril here."

"It's always when you think you're safe," Bucky said. "We can't be complacent."

Later that night, several cars and a few wallets later, they were five hundred miles away, holed up in a hotel room not so different from any of the ones from before. Rilian had been pretty quiet for most of the day; quiet like that always meant consequences. Bucky had learned that when he was the Soldier.

Instead of asking if there was anything wrong, Bucky said, "I'll take first watch."

They hadn't done a watch in a couple weeks, another thing they'd gotten complacent about. But Rilian didn't argue; instead, he flashed Bucky a tired smile and said, "Very well."

***

A few days and half a dozen auto thefts later, Bucky kissed him. He didn't plan to, had no idea he meant to until the hotel room door closed behind him and he pressed Rilian against it. It was a sudden, instinctual motion. Could have been something worse, and he wouldn't even have realized it until it was too late to take it back. Took him a second to realize he'd pressed his lips to Rilian's instead of bringing out a gun or a knife; took him a second longer to realized Rilian was kissing him back. In that time, Rilian could have very well stabbed him, except all that happened was that the kiss went on and on.

When they broke apart, Rilian smiled at him, with joy and renewed wonder, and said, "So you do remember how it was between us."

"I don't remember any of that," Bucky said, and waited for the moment when Rilian's face would fall, when he'd be disappointed—the way someone was always disappointed in the end, when he remembered the wrong thing or said the wrong thing or… "I only remember you, here with me. Helping me. Making me better."

Because Rilian had made him better. All this time—Bucky wasn't even sure if he would be anything like a person by now, if Rilian hadn't been with him. If he hadn't had to think about someone else instead of just himself. If he hadn't had someone asking questions, having needs and opinions. Someone who knew him from another time and place, someone who cared about him. Someone who'd never asked for anything Bucky couldn't give, not even this—

But Rilian's face didn't fall, and if his smile faltered, it could only have been for a split second. "Then I will remember for both of us," he said, and pulled Bucky closer, and kissed him again.

Turned out he knew all sorts of things about Bucky's body Bucky had either forgotten or never known in the first place. Things they spent the whole night remembering together, with no chance of either of them keeping a watch.

***

The next morning, a terrible yowling came from outside the door of their room. Bucky went to see what it was, gun in hand, only to find a cat sitting out on the sidewalk. It was big and orange, just like the cat that had stopped him from leaving Rilian behind in a Love's parking lot; as soon as Bucky cracked open the door, it sauntered into the hotel room like it thought its name was on the credit card they'd used to pay for it.

"Your cat's back," he said to Rilian, who seemed delighted, and didn't seem to question how a cat they'd known for two minutes in Ohio could have followed them all the way to Arizona.

"I know animals don't speak in your world, not as they do in Narnia," Rilian said, who'd grilled Bucky on the subject of parrots for a couple of hours a while back, which was a really long time considering how much Bucky didn't know about them. "Still, I would not be astonished if he were to open his mouth and prove himself a Talking Cat."

"He talks plenty," Bucky said, remembering that yowl.

He didn't bother trying to say they weren't keeping him, and wasn't surprised when the cat loaded up in the car like he belonged there. He spent the day's drive alternating between sleeping on the dashboard and sitting up in Rilian's lap to look out the window.

***

A few days later, they found another apartment to sublet, this one in California. It made Bucky just as nervous as the last one, until the point where it didn't, on just about the same timeline. But Rilian liked it better here than he had at the last one. They weren't too far from the beach, which Rilian said reminded him of his home. They went walking there a lot, especially after dark. Bucky kept catching Rilian looking for mermaids, even though Bucky was pretty sure there weren't any on Earth, and kept telling him so.

Rilian liked it there, and so Bucky tried to tell himself he wasn't being complacent, or that if he was, if didn't matter, because no one was after them anyway. It didn't work except to keep him awake for a few nights in a row, keeping his own watch with Rilian sleeping beside him.

"You wish us to depart," Rilian said when Bucky finally went to tell him. Before he could tell him.

"Yeah," Bucky said. He hadn't expected Rilian to look so dull, or sound so resigned. Maybe he'd made the wrong move. Maybe he should have tried harder not to listen to the warning from inside, the one that blared at him even though nothing ever happened.

"Let us walk once more, then."

So they went out to the beach. The waves were choppy, the wind strong enough it had scared all the other walkers off.

"I do not wish to leave you," Rilian said, after a long fifteen minutes where he hadn't once looked over his shoulder to see about mermaids. "Never believe for an instant that I did—and believe, also, that I have been told we will meet again."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Bucky asked, and was startled to see Rilian's eyes shining in the starlight.

"Last night, I had a dream. Within it, I was told you would soon decide to depart this place; and that when you did, I would return to my own world. It won't be long now; I feel already the call of Narnia, and of Cair Paravel by the sea. I will be there within the next few minutes, whether I will it or no. (Believe me when I say I do not...and at the same time, I am Rilian, King of Narnia, and from Narnia I have been absent for long enough.)"

Before Bucky could answer, there came a barrage of gunfire from somewhere in the shadows above the shoreline. It hit the sand in front of them and behind them. Before it quieted, both Rilian and Bucky had pulled a gun. They stood back to back, looking for where the gunfire had come from.

Motion came from behind a trash barrel; Rilian and Bucky both fired. The trash barrel fired back, proving at least that they hadn't aimed at any civilians. Bucky corrected his aim; the next time he fired, a shadow fell to the ground behind the can.

The rest of the fight went quickly. Part of Bucky logged each move—his, Rilian's, the Hydra agents who must have been ordered to take him dead—but the rest of him went along with it, letting it happen without worrying too much about the hows or the whys or the consequences. He knew these motions, these moves; he'd been in enough firefights to know it would go better if he didn't let thinking about it get in his way.

After about three minutes, it was quiet again. All the threats neutralized, all the gunfire silent. Bucky couldn't even hear anyone's breathing but his own—

And that was when Bucky turned around to look for Rilian, and found there was no one there. Rilian wasn't standing at his back like he had been just a couple of second ago, nor was he lying wounded on the ground. He hadn't walked away, either—there were only two clear sets of footprints this close to the water, and Rilian's had stopped where he'd been standing.

Rilian's gun was lying on the sand, right where it would have been if he'd dropped it. He hadn't managed to anything with it; he'd always claimed to be an expert swordsman, but he hadn't been anything like an expert shot. At least not in the dark, or at a distance.

Bucky stood there for a few seconds. Didn't take long for him to decide there was no point in sticking around to see if anything else happened. Rilian had gone, as quickly as he'd come in the first place. He was home, probably, in the kingdom he'd always talked about, the one Bucky had been to and still couldn't remember anything about for himself. Rilian had gone home, and Bucky was here without him—and he'd been right, when he'd thought they'd been in one place for too long. He'd been right, and he didn't have time to think about anything else, because right now he needed to figure out his next move.

Bucky let instinct take over again. Extraction, evasion, disguise.

He walked down the beach for another few miles, looking over his shoulder at the water whenever he wasn't looking for soldiers in the shadows. He didn't know what he expected to see out there.

He found a car, a little fast one. Didn't take long to pick the lock, his hand of flesh as steady as the other. Took barely more time to start it up, locating the necessary wires in the dark. By the time the sky lightened, Bucky was a few hundred miles away.

He hadn't bothered to go back to their apartment. It wasn't like Rilian was going to be there, and without him, none of the rest really mattered.

***

Bucky drove all day, only stopping to fuel up, and, twice, to steal other cars. Didn't bother switching license plates, or eating; the part of him that was in charge of strategy thought it would be a good idea to slow down, but the part of him that was in charge of him was the part of him that was running. He was running from them, the ones who'd found him when he'd been working so hard to convince himself they were safe; he was running from everything else that was going to hit him just as soon as he slowed down long enough to let it.

He stopped at a rest stop to sleep, long after dark and too jumpy to want to take a hotel room. It was better. It was safer. He could see all the way around, could take off in any direction if he needed too.

He got out of the car at dawn to take a piss before getting back on the road. When he came back from the restroom, there was the cat, big and yellow, sitting in the gravel by the driver's-side door.

When he opened the driver's door, the cat jumped in, and took over the passenger seat, like it belonged there. And when they were on the highway and Bucky reached a hand over to pet it—right hand, hand of flesh, hand that shook a little although he didn't know why it wanted to do that now instead of yesterday—it purred loudly enough to fill the whole car.

That night, Bucky took a hotel room, and the cat slept on his chest, a warm weight that rumbled the whole night through. Rilian had always talked to it like it was a person; Bucky thought about doing the same thing, but in the end he couldn't think of what to say. He left it inside his head instead, all his feelings and thoughts, all the emptiness that the cat's warmth seemed to be trying to fill.

In the morning, the cat was gone. It wasn't in the bathtub, or under the bed. It hadn't figured out a way into the dresser drawers, couldn't have gotten out the bolted and chained door. In the end, Bucky left the room just as empty as they'd found it.

***

It didn't take too long to find the others, once Bucky started looking. Steve hadn't had the training Bucky'd had; neither he nor the guy with him were trying not to be found. Probably hadn't occurred to him that he would come looking, but it was still stupid.

Finding them was simple enough, but trailing them was the easiest thing in the world. Neither of them ever set a watch, even though Steve at least should have known better; they'd been in the Army together, after they'd been in Brooklyn together, so Bucky _knew_ Steve should have known better. And they never switched out cars, either, or even the plates. They always got up at the same time to leave, never drove more than ten to twelve hours in a day, and never seemed to realize that anyone was following them. A couple times, Bucky was no more than three cars behind them on the interstate, and they still didn't notice him.

Wasn't just Bucky on their tail, either. He spent the next couple days taking out the Hydra agents neither Steve nor his buddy seemed to notice. He took all the training he'd gotten, and gave it back to them until there were none left to give it back to.

It didn't take long for it to start to feel weird, following the two of them. It didn't take long for it to start to feel lonely. A couple months ago, Bucky wouldn't have known lonely if it had come up to him and stuck a gun in his face; but now, he'd had Rilian, for a while. He knew what it was like not to be alone, and found he didn't like it too much now that it had happened again.

A couple weeks after he'd found Steve again, Bucky knocked on a hotel room door.

When it opened, he said, "Hi, Steve."

***

The next couple years involved a lot of doctors, both the kind who wanted to poke at his body and the kind that wanted to poke at the inside of his head. Bucky didn't have a lot of patience for any of it, and only put up with them for as long as he had to to get the all-clear.

He didn't tell anyone about Rilian. Not the doctors, not the shrinks, not Steve. Not a word about where Rilian had come from. Not a word about how he'd made Bucky feel like a person probably ten times faster than he could have all on his own. Not a word about how he wasn't sure if he ever would have, on his own.

Eventually, he started going on missions with Steve and the others. He wasn't exactly an Avenger, but wasn't exactly not one, either; and this it something good he could do, to make up for the rest of what he'd put out in the world.

As the months passed, he kept hoping he'd remember Rilian, and his own time in Narnia. That the exercises his shrink had given him would help, as they'd helped him remember a little more about his sisters, a little more about things that weren't Steve or the war or all the things he'd done because he'd been told to. If he could remember Rilian, beyond the time they'd spent together here, then maybe it would be a little like having him back...but it never happened, no matter how hard Bucky tried or how much he wanted it.

But one day, a couple years later, something else did happen.

***

Bucky was walking down the street with a paper bag full of groceries when he saw it: A flash of yellow fur, darting across the street and into an alley. Looked like a cat. Big one.

He followed it. When he got to the alley, it was sitting there, just as haughty as it had been when it was Rilian's cat. It looked at him, then stood up and walked further into the alley. When it had gone a few feet, it stopped and looked back over its shoulder.

"What kind of cat are you, anyway?" Bucky said. By now, he'd learned a little more about cats, and done the math; this one showing up in all the places within the span of time it had wasn't just unlikely. It was impossible.

The cat didn't make a sound, didn't so much as open its mouth. Yet somehow, Bucky heard it anyway: _Well? Are you coming?_

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Yeah, I am."

The cat started walking again. Bucky followed.

He'd only gone four or five steps when he stepped from the asphalt out into nothing, and fell.

***

The water around him was frigid, and something else was making him list to the side, trying to drag him down. Took Bucky a few seconds of thrashing to take in the situation, to realize that his metal arm was trying to sink him, and to figure out how to counteract it.

It was only once he'd managed to swim close enough to the edge of the water for his feet to find the ground that he thought to wonder where the hell he was.

Then he looked up and saw a guy standing by the edge of the water. The moment he saw him, he knew him. Rilian was much skinnier than he'd been on Earth, with huge circles under his eyes; and if there was any wonder there, it was pretty far back, behind everything else he'd talked about, the doubts that had brought him here. On the ground next to him lay a dagger. Bucky had a pretty good idea what Rilian had been planning to do with it

He walked toward Rilian, the water's pull growing less and less the closer he got to shore. He emerged from the water dripping, and suppressed the urge to shudder; if he let himself start, he wasn't going to stop for a while, and wouldn't be able to say any of the things he was supposed to.

"Who are you?" Rilian asked in a low voice, hand on the hilt of his sword. "If this is some manner of sorcery, then I warn you: You would do best to turn your back now, for I will not go quietly."

Bucky laughed. He couldn't help it. It ran through him, along with a new knowledge: That, somehow, everything Rilian had told him about their past was in front of them, and not behind. That there was a reason, after all, that he'd never been able to remember this. That even when Bucky had to go, the way Rilian had had to go, they'd see each other again, at some point.

"Don't worry," Bucky said, grinning wide, the way he couldn't even have dreamed of grinning when Rilian had first come to him. "We're going to be _real_ good friends."


End file.
